Joe and Ann Pollack, St. Louis' most experienced food writers, lead a tour of restaurants, wines, shops and other interesting places. When we travel, you will travel with us. When we eat, drink, cook, entertain or read, we'll share our knowledge and opinions. Come along for the ride!!
Copyright 2013, Ann Lemons Pollack.

May 08, 2017

Small Craft Warnings - and more

Small Craft Warnings does not tell a tale with a tidy story arc. Tennessee Williams’ 1972 play was expanded from an earlier, shorter work of his called Confessional. That title may be more relevant than the newer one.

In a real dive bar, not the kind populated with hipsters, somewhere along the Southern California coast, we find Monk (Peter Mayer), the owner who lives upstairs, preparing to open for another day of business. Dunsi Dai’s set looks so right, we can almost hear shoes sticking to the floor. Long-time customer Doc (Jeremy Lawrence) is the first to arrive. Doc is clearly down at the heel, rather shabby in his dress and shambling in his gait. He’s there on business, and it’s not to assess Monk’s rather alarming-sounding cough. He’s there for a drink or ten, sometimes using it to wash down a benzedrine tablet. Williams himself played Doc at one point of the play’s first run, and benzedrine was one of his personal drugs of choice.

Soon there appears Bill (Eric Dean White), another frequent flier at the saloon, nattily attired in a tropical shirt and sienna-colored trousers so tight one waits for the sound of ripping seams. He’s the unemployed man toy of Leona (Elizabeth Townsend), a beautician who lives with him in her trailer so small the two of them use bunk beds. She, too, has a fair thirst, and when she arrives to find Bill being manhandled, so to speak, by the waif-ish Violet (Magan Wiles) she’d befriended, battle ensues.

This is late Williams, and at a number of points, action pauses, Michael Sullivan’s lights change slightly and focus on a character who talks about what they’re thinking, trying to explain things to themselves and to us. There’s a deep sadness and cynicism in all this, and yet an openness – two gay men, newcomers who walk into the bar, talk more openly about their sexuality than in any Williams play I can recall.

Director Richard Corley has evoked some particularly fine performances. Chief among these is Townsend as Leona, who gives nuance to the blowsiness and a constant edge to everything she does. White’s Bill would, if he had a job, be a first-rate lounge lizard, slick and ego-laden and sure of himself, despite evidence to the contrary. Lawrence shows us a Doc whose brain hasn’t entirely been pickled but whose sense of ethics certainly has – and yet, somehow, remains slightly sympathetic. And then there’s the Viola created by Magan Wiles, such a creature as we haven’t seen for a while. Is she mentally ill? Developmentally delayed? PTSD’d? She clings to men with the fluidity of a sheet with static electricity, hanging on them even as she goes limp.

These may not be people we care about – but Williams manages to make us curious about them, which is about as far as most of us can go. The run on this goes through next weekend, another of the extended performances that are such a good idea.

Another note here – the last performance of Bertha in Paradise was Sunday afternoon, so I can’t send you there. But this cabaret performance, by Anita Jackson, playing Bertha, the prostitute who seemed to be dying in last year’s St. Louis Rooming House Plays, was pretty stunning. Jackson was belting numbers like “I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl”, the old Bessie Smith tune more recently sung by Nina Simone and Queen Latifah, and morphing seamlessly into wonderful Cole Porter like “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”. Charles Creath was at the piano, Donna Weinsting was Goldie, the madam, who sang a little as well, and then there was Joel, the stage hand, who did a lot more than adjust the microphone. Definitely adult material, but in a town that loves cabaret, that doesn’t matter. If something like this comes up next year, put it on your schedule, please.